The Island in the Sea of Time series is a trilogy by S. M. Stirling. While the series lacks a more official name, it is typically referred to by the title of its first installment, Island in the Sea of Time.
It starts off when the entire island of Nantucket is sent back in time to the late Bronze Age by a mysterious dome of light. "The Event" also brings along the Eagle, a Coast Guard training vessel — a mixed blessing for Nantucket, for, while the ship and its crew prove invaluable in saving the island from starvation, one of the officers, William Walker, gathers a band of followers and hijacks a ship for England, where he sets himself up as a warlord among the Indo-European tribes of the area. For obvious reasons, the people of Nantucket are not pleased with this, and the Town Meeting, under the leadership of former police chief Jared Cofflin and Marian Alston, captain of the Eagle, sends a force after him.
The stories are:
- Island in the Sea of Time
- Against the Tide of Years
- On the Oceans of Eternity
- Blood Wolf (A short story set after the main series)
The series is tenuously connected to the Emberverse, which covers what happened in the world Nantucket left behind.
The series as a whole provides examples of:
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All of the main books have long titles that end with "The word of word".
- Oh, Crap!:
- In Island in the Sea of Time, the character Swindapa is captured, brutally raped, and given nasty STDs by her culture's enemies, then given as a present to the Nantucketer admiral, who is an utter badass black lesbian coast guard officer and martial artist, who frees her and teaches her how to use a katana. In the climactic battle, Swindapa ambushes her erstwhile tormentors, who barely have the time for an Oh Crap moment before they're beheaded or disemboweled. In the same battle, the Big Bad William Walker has one when the Nantucketers manage to blow up his supply of gunpowder, which fueled the only three cannons in the world, which had been busily enfilading the Nantucket lines.
- A more comedic version occurs in Against the Tide of Years, when Kenneth Hollard discovers that he's been chosen to be the consort for Raupasha, the de facto Queen of the Mitanni.
- Temporal Theme Naming: The words that end the titles of the main books.
